The Perfect Picture

My first visit to Japan was for a one-month vacation and to meet my (then) pen pal and future husband face-to-face for the first time. My husband had arranged for us to do some typical sight-seeing in Japan during my stay. This included, among other things, the obligatory trip to Tokyo Disneyland and a bus tour of Nikko. For those who don't know, Nikko is one of the more temple-rich areas of Japan.

In the opinion of most Japanese people, the best time to visit Nikko is in the fall because it's got a lot of trees and the leaves change color at that time of year. Of course, part of the reason the Japanese get so excited about it is that they don't seem to realize that people in other countries also have heavily-forested areas which also see a burst of autumnal colors annually. In my home area, there's an Autumn Leaf Festival each year because of the rich concentrations of trees. I guess that the whole "Japan has four seasons" notion also plays into it because they don't seem to realize that other areas actually experience a picture perfect autumn. Given that my vacation was in March (1988) and the fact that colorful leaves, appealing as they may be, aren't exactly a novelty for me after at least a decade of Autumn Leaf Festivals which I was old enough to attend, I saw Nikko in spring-like weather.

If you've never taken a bus tour in Japan, the experience itself is a very good reflection of how things work in Japan and what sort of experience people will pay for and accept with good grace. The tour guide runs around with a little flag and all the patrons are expected to dutifully follow her as she sets a brisk pace. If you're interested in seeing anything for any length of time, you can forget about it as the tour moves on unhindered by your desire to spend more than two minutes at each point of interest and the guide prattles on at break-neck speed in Japanese. Back then, we didn't understand a word she was saying so the entire tour was pretty much conducted with us ignorant of the historical details she was (no doubt) offering. At one point, we lagged behind a little too much and got separated from the group. There was a famous temple at the top of a huge amount of steps which the group was permitted to climb up to and we caught up with them there. I don't know what would have happened if we hadn't been able to reconnect with them, but I'm guessing they'd have had no compunctions about leaving us behind, particularly because we were always trying to linger and actually have a good look at the blur of landmarks the tour was trotting us past.

The temples in Nikko are interesting and the landscape lovely. It's a good spot for anyone to visit on a stop to Japan. There are wild monkeys roaming about in some areas and we saw a few in the trees as the bus sped along to one of it's multiple destinations. The whole experience was quite exhausting though and rather un-fulfilling because of the speed with which we were shuttled past everything. Nikko is simply far too vast an area to really be enjoyed completely on one of these types of structured tours and I think we'd have been better off venturing there on our own. However, we didn't have the skills to manage it at the time, and we haven't had the impulse to return.

At one point during our whirlwind tour, we (my husband and myself) and about 25 Japanese tourists, were grouped together for a tour group picture. That picture is currently in storage in the U.S. so I don't have it on hand to post. The group was crammed relatively close together to get us all in the shot and my husband (who wasn't my husband at the time, mind you) put his arm around my shoulder and I put my arm around his waist. After we did this, the tour staff bustled over and chattered away and indicated with gestures that we were not to do this in the picture. They made us stand there with arms at sides like everyone else. The resulting picture is of a large group of Japanese people looking somewhat grimly at the camera and two smiling foreigners in the back row. Not one of the Japanese people in the picture is smiling.

In this day and age, I believe that people would smile though I don't know if the age of the people being photographed is a factor. It's my feeling that the photographer objected to our display of affection in the picture, and perhaps people didn't smile, because it was a group picture of which everyone was going to get a copy. Perhaps he felt that it'd be distracting or offensive to the mostly middle-aged folks who would be getting the picture if there was a wanton display of lust as evidenced by my husband's arm around my shoulder.

While I often see personal photos from my students' vacations, I rarely see any with couples expressing affection for one another in the shot. However, one of my students was showing me her vacation photos from a visit to Yosemite in the U.S. and she and her husband had their arms around each other. I remarked that I thought it looked very sweet. She told me that she wouldn't have done it if the picture had involved anyone except the two of them and she wouldn't have done it in front of other people in Japan. I got the impression that she felt that the picture would be spoiled for other people if they expressed affection physically in the photo. I guess this is why my husband and I were restrained in the group photo that was taken of us at Nikko.

Candy Bento

Click this picture to see a larger one with more detail.

One of my husband's students gave him the very cute "bento" pictured above. All of the candy is hard sugar candy fashioned to resemble typical Japanese boxed lunch fare. The "rice" is made up of white "konpeito" which I usually don't see in markets unless it's around the time of the Children's Day holiday or White Day. Most people assume konpeito is candy of Japanese origin but it's actually from Portugal.

The red candy in the middle of the "rice" represents umeboshi (a very sour pickled plum). Umeboshi is one of those things, along with natto (sticky, stinky fermented soybeans), that the Japanese delight in asking foreigners if they like or not. Most of them assume we'll hate them because they are very sour, but I actually like them. It's not the sort of thing you'd snack on but they are a nice accompaniment to certain dishes. When I worked in Nishi-Shinjuku, there was a tonkatsu (breaded, fried pork cutlet) restaurant near our office which kept a little pot full of umeboshi on the table for patrons to partake of while eating their meal. I haven't really had much umeboshi since then, but one of my students brought me an umeboshi hard candy which was popular at her company. While I really like umeboshi, I think it's not the sort of thing that goes well with sugar.

Other items being mimicked in this candy bento appear to include an orange slice, a mushroom, various Japanese pickles, and possibly a carrot. There's even a little fake piece of plastic greenery in it like regular real bento. I'm not sure what the point of these little bits of plastic are, but they look like a little hedge of grass and are used to embellish raw meat sold in trays in finer shops in addition to bento. The tray is made of plastic meant to imitate traditional Japanese lacquer ware.

This is a very cute little souvenir, but it's so precious that it's almost too cute to eat. Fortunately, there's a little silica gel packet in it to preserve it so you can keep it around for awhile if you'd prefer to look at it rather than eat it. Even though I'm not a great fan of sugar-based hard candy (because of the impact on my teeth), I did sample a piece and the colors do appear to relate to the flavors. The piece that looks like a carrot is orange-flavored and quite nice for a bit of hard candy. The main problem is that some of the larger pieces are too big to comfortably hold in your mouth for the duration that it takes to consume it.

Know It All

When I was about 12, my cousin and I were making cupcakes at my grandmother's house. We mixed the batter up in a big plastic bowl and were about to tip the bowl so that we could pour the contents into the individual slots in the muffin tin. As we went to pour it, my grandmother told us that we were never going to manage to pour the batter into the small holes of the tins without it overspilling because we couldn't pour a thin enough stream from such a wide bowl.

Since we were every bit the insufferable, know-it-all snots that most pre-teens are, we said we were sure that we could manage it. My grandmother, who knew a good bet, told us that she'd give us a dollar if we managed it and we'd each owe her a dollar if we failed. Confident in our ability to carefully pour the batter into each muffin cup, we made the bet and tipped the bowl over only to pour a not insignificant amount outside the first cup. Being cheap, insufferable, know-it-all snots, we claimed that the terms of the bet were not clearly defined and refused to pony up the dough.

Any person who is honest with herself is going to remember a time and an age when she thought she knew it all and the wisdom of those with more age and experience fell on her very deaf ears. Any person who has lived long enough will remember being that person more than once. I particularly recall spending a few college years thinking I knew as much as I was ever going to need to or could and that no one had much left to teach me nor was I far from being fully self-actualized. My cluelessness is quite striking in retrospect.

At this point in time, I'd say that the only true wisdom we can all possess is the irrefutable knowledge that there are serious limits to our wisdom and knowledge. This is a notion which is sadly lacking in the population of the Internet. The recent flap over (another) school banning Wikipedia for academic purposes reminded me of this. You will never meet as big a group of know-it-alls as you will find on the Internet. There are a good many people who appear to believe the collective knowledge of layman who sit behind their keyboards digesting tidbits of information on the web sites they browse makes them authorities on the topics they have a passing interest in. Mind you, most of these people don't even read a newspaper site on a daily basis and are gaining information in a way not too dissimilar from reading the backs of Trivial Pursuit cards. These people are outraged that Wikipedia isn't considered a legitimate source of information. They delight in deriding the validity of their textbooks and sniff at the indignity of having to go to some musty, old cavern of a library. Personally, I get the feeling these people haven't been to a library since the late 1800's since I haven't seen one that was dark, musty, or out-dated in my life-time. Most of them look very modern and have banks of computers.

The scary thing about the people who believe they know it all is that they lack awareness or understanding of what the difference is between the people who write textbooks and the people who make Wikipedia entries. They believe that the notion that information in books and journals has more academic value than what is freely available on the Internet is an elitist sentiment and implies that only intellectuals can offer up useful information. They fail to see that there's a difference between people who devote their lives to exploring a corner of a field and apply research principals to their work, write it up at length (taking years sometimes to complete their work), submit it for professional editing and peer review, and have it published and people who edit Wiki entries when they have some free time.

Recognizing the authors of scholarly journals and texts as credible and Wikipedia information as far less credible isn't a matter of believing knowledge can only be imparted by the well-educated and elite. It's about quality control and depth and recognizing that Internet sources are, by and large, lacking in both. When it comes to finding out what a word or concept you never heard of means for curiosity's sake, Wikipedia is your place to go, but it's not the place to research term papers or mine for thesis material.

The main problem with Wikipedia is that it's fast food information. It isn't even a really good source for pointing you to other good sources as its references are to other shallow Internet information sites. If you've ever done any real research in a college library, you'd know that the citations you get from journals are far better ways of pointing you to other sources than checking out links on Wikipedia. Those who feel Wikipedia is a first stop on the road to research don't have any idea how poor a resource it is because they don't know how vastly superior other resources are.

Wikipedia (for academic purposes) advocates are little different from my cousin and I trying to pour that batter out of a huge bowl into a small muffin tin slot for the first time. Our grandmother knew better than us because she had cooked and handled her bowls more than us. People who have actually done true research know how much better it is than researching on the Internet but, you're never going to convince the know-it-alls that they don't know it all. That includes knowing that banning Wikipedia for academic paper writing is probably a very good idea.

Consumables and Comestibles

I've mentioned in previous posts on Costco that those of us living in Japan who don't have cars (which is a far greater than the number of foreigners who do) can use a delivery service to ship large quantities of items to our apartments. Each box costs ¥600 ($5.40) to ship and they can be quite huge. In fact, the boxes pictured above take up a little less than half of the available floor space in our kitchen. Of course, that's just as much a reflection of the size of our apartment as the boxes themselves.


My husband's most recent sojourn to Costco yielded one of the largest collections of food and household items we've ever amassed at any given time. Unpacking these boxes and finding a place to put things literally takes a couple of hours and the contents are expected to last months in many cases. If we load up enough items, he can wait 4 months between trips and that saves both time and money (because of train fare).


This trip included much more "entertainment food" than usual because of the upcoming holidays and the total for everything came to around ¥75,000 ($675). While that may sound like a tremendous amount of money, it's not that huge when you consider the cost of living in Tokyo and that the items will last a long time. Some of the things we buy will take up to a year to consume. We have to look at the one-time big tab as a way of saving money over a long period of time. For instance, the big case of paper towels is about half the cost of Japanese paper towels and will probably last 8 months. Liquid laundry detergent which costs about twice the cost of a very small box of Japanese powdered laundry soap will last a year and won't cake up in the humid summer. The Japanese powder would last about 2 months.

In fact, one of the best ways to appreciate the savings is to compare the small Japanese jar of Skippy on the left to the big American one on the right. The small jar contains 12 oz. (340 g.) of peanut butter and the large one 64 oz. (1.8. kg.). The larger one only costs about twice the small one, but has six times the quantity. Please note that my husband and I aren't huge consumers of peanut butter and normally we wouldn't want this much peanut butter on hand. However, with Christmas coming, I expect to be making up about a hundred or so peanut butter cookies to include as part of gift bags for both my husband's and my students. Each batch of cookies takes one cup of peanut butter or an entire Japanese size jar. I'll probably need to use 1/2-2/3 of that huge American jar just for Christmas cookies.

Knowing all of the savings over the long run doesn't necessarily stop me from cringing when we fork over a large amount of money all at once though. It's still rather painful to consider blowing that much money on consumables and comestibles.

Bumpers and Bumpees

If you experience something long and often enough, it eventually stops leaving an impression on you consciously. One of the problems with having been in Japan for so long is that there are a lot of remarkable things which no longer have much of an impact on you. Some of these things are positive, some negative, and some benign. Recently, I had an experience which I've had thousands of times before which has become so common-place that it has, for the most part, stopped registering consciously with me.

I was shopping for food in one of several tiny markets I often go to and, as is often the case, another shopper bumped into me in the narrow spaces. During any given excursion to purchase our daily bread, this will happen at least once and in the smaller places, as many as five times in one visit. About eighty percent of the time, the person who bumps into me will mumble a casual "sumimasen" (excuse me) and about two percent of the time say a more polite "gomen nasai" (I'm sorry). The other eighteen percent of the time, I get the "gaijin (foreigner) exclusive" treatment.

The "gaijin exclusive" occurs when the other party turns around to say they're sorry for bumping into you, but suddenly realize that it isn't a fellow Japanese they've buffeted but a foreigner. The process comes in several stages rapidly occurring in mere seconds and can be read very clearly in the eyes and mouth of the offending party. In stage one, they have the same bland look and slightly parted lips that preface a perfunctory expression of apology in a random encounter with a stranger. Stage two sees the eyes widen and the mouth drop open as they realize they've bumped into a gaijin and not a Japanese person. Stage three sees the eyes narrow and the mouth draws into a tight-lipped line. No apology is given and one gets the distinct impression that a 180 degree change in attitude has occurred wherein the blame has now shifted squarely onto the bumpee instead of the bumper.

In times like this, I get the feeling the other person has decided that it's my fault they bumped into me because I had the audacity to occupy space in the same country as them. The looks in these situations are almost always disapproving and a little angry. I guess it's possible that the party involved has simply decided I'm insufficiently versed in Japanese to understand any perfunctory apology they offer, but the eyes and mouth say otherwise.

Of course, on occasion I bump people accidentally (though honestly, I try very, very hard never to do so) and I always say "sumimasen". If the person doesn't see me because the bump is from the side or behind, I get a nod or no reaction. If the person does see me, I sometimes get a massively exaggerated response to the tiniest collision. Sometimes the party acts as though a little bump with my back-pack has nearly knocked them over. Sometimes they act as though I've nearly propelled the basket from their hands by tapping it gently with mine. This only occurs when they see me coming.

The thing that occurred to me a few days ago when this happened (yet again) was that it's happened so much that I don't really think much about it anymore. On the one hand, that's a good thing since I don't get angry about it (though I used to). On the other hand, it seems wrong to not take note of it as it can be seen as a way of accepting it by taking it in stride. Of course, it's rather pointless to do otherwise since there's nothing I can do to change it. It's these sorts of experiences which I find comprise the bulk of the racial discrimination I experience in Japan. They're small and don't really do any serious harm, but they're everywhere you go and are like a constant low murmur that you don't belong and that your presence makes people uncomfortable.